You’d have to have a Grinch-size heart not to feel a smile spreading across your face when Luke Spring, a 9-year-old dynamo with feathers for feet, starts tapping his little heart out in “A Christmas Story,” a new musical that opened on Monday night at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. Clad in a sleek black suit, his high-wattage grin beaming into the auditorium, this energetic little charmer raises such a merry clatter with his nimble dancing that it all but brings down the house.

I wouldn’t exactly consider myself a soft touch when it comes to sentimental stories set during the Christmas season. (I’ve never even seen “It’s a Wonderful Life.”) But tap-dancing kids? Forget it. Out go the critical faculties, to be replaced by the kind of mindless adoration that the young hero of this musical brings to his obsessive worship of a toy BB gun.

Every year at this time Broadway producers are seized with the urge to pick parents’ pockets with splashy holiday fare aimed at young audiences. “A Christmas Story,” based on the popular 1983 movie adapted from the writings of the radio personality Jean Shepherd, wins points for being less glitzy and more soft-spoken than the garish, overbearing musical versions of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “Elf.” Set in Indiana in 1940, it glows with sepia-toned nostalgia for a Simpler Time, back when a boy’s ardent desire for a BB gun inspired only a time-tested maternal riposte (“You’ll shoot your eye out”) and not dark fears that Junior might grow up to take out half his high school class with an automatic weapon.

Shepherd narrates the stage version in the likable person of Dan Lauria, former star of the similarly nostalgic television series “The Wonder Years.” I found the heavy doses of voice-over in the rather clunky movie to be obtrusive and irritating. Happily, the stage version lightens up a little on the cute, smart-alecky asides (“My fevered brain seethed with the effort to come up with an infinitely subtle device to implant the air rifle indelibly into my parents’ consciousness without their being aware of it”), making room for the music and allowing the story mostly to speak for itself.

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A leg-shaped lamp, cherished by the Old Man (John Bolton), gets its own number, as he leads a chorus of dancers kicking legs, human and lamp, sky-high.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Not that there’s much story to speak of. The show, with a book by Joseph Robinette and a score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (the composer-lyricists of “Dogfight”), sticks to the episodic narrative from the movie.

Directed efficiently by John Rando, it’s a collage of childhood snapshots taken from the tingly, exciting month before Christmas, when dreams of a big haul from Santa Claus form in little minds. The centrality of the holiday to the childhood Weltanschauung is neatly encapsulated in the synthetic holiday jingle concocted for the musical by Mr. Pasek and Mr. Paul, which is remorselessly reprised: “It All Comes Down to Christmas.”

Like all sensible boys his age, the bespectacled Everykid Ralphie, played with amiable spunk by Johnny Rabe, lives in fear of sensible gifts like sweaters, and has fixated on the Red Ryder carbine action BB gun as the only acquisition that will make his 9-year-old life worth living. His ingenious, seemingly unavailing attempts to persuade his parents to allow him this cherished gift form the slender backbone of the musical.

As fans of the movie will no doubt remember, Ralphie seems to have inherited his single-mindedness from his father, whose fondness for blue language is matched only by his fervent wish to win a crossword puzzle contest. The Old Man (a gangly, goofy John Bolton), as he is referred to in the show’s Middle America-speak of yore, finds his heroic efforts rewarded when a telegram arrives announcing that a prize is on its way. It turns out to be a lamp in the shape of a shapely woman’s leg swathed in a fishnet stocking, and the Old Man cherishes it as if it were his very own Oscar.

Why such an unsightly item — rightly referred to by Mother (Erin Dilly) as the ugliest thing in Christendom — should have been manufactured and presumably sold in the Midwest in 1940 is an incalculable mystery, but never mind. The lamp played a supporting role in the movie, and gets its own splashy number here, with Mr. Bolton leading a chorus of dancers all kicking their own legs, and their plastic lamp legs, sky-high. (At the amply stocked gift shop at the back of the theater, you too can purchase this novelty item in assorted sizes. The largest version is a mere $250.)

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A Christmas Story, the Musical Ralphie (Johnny Rabe) is off to the races with a toy gun, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Mr. Pasek and Mr. Paul have provided a likable, perky score that duly translates all of the major episodes in the story into appropriate musical numbers: Ralphie and his brother, Randy (Zac Ballard), enduring the humiliations of the local bully; the licking-the-cold-flagpole scandal; the visit to a cranky department store Santa Claus. The finest song is probably “Just Like That,” a lament for the quick passing of the childhood years performed with tender care by Ms. Dilly.

But the sequences that make the children in the audience perk up and stop fidgeting are naturally the big dance numbers led by the smaller fry in the cast. “A Christmas Story” features a sizable group of young performers that makes the small band of orphans in “Annie” look positively skimpy. They are wonderfully showcased in a couple of fantasy numbers that are the highlights of each act, and are choreographed with invention by Warren Carlyle.

In “Ralphie to the Rescue!” the stage becomes a Wild West town where Ralphie, with his trusty Red Ryder in hand, saves various damsels in distress in the guise of a sharpshooting cowboy. And the tap extravaganza in which Mr. Spring so impressively acquits himself comes in the course of a loopy number that finds the kids in the cast portraying dapper gents and their dolls cavorting in a speakeasy in the 1930s. (It’s very “Bugsy Malone,” for those who remember that peculiar movie.)

Why Ralphie’s imagination should be fired by such imagery is not made clear, but I was too dazzled by that stage full of children making a joyful, metallic noise to care.

You’re welcome to your Red Ryder carbine action BB gun, Ralphie. What I want for Christmas is a pair of tap shoes.